Flygskam makes airlines worry and jet-setters feel guilty
When cyclist Anna Hughes stopped flying 10 years ago, it seemed like a radical fringe idea. But now the founder of Flight Free UK has convinced thousands of people to join her
— and to avoid flying due to the climate effects of air travel.
Her campaign is just one part of a no-fly movement that is spreading rapidly across Europe and has given birth to a new phrase: flygskam, or Swedish for flight-shame, which means feeling guilty about jetting off on vacation. “It has become a social norm that you think holiday, you think flight,” says Hughes, who no longer goes anywhere that cannot be reached by bicycle, train or boat. “Most people are unaware of how flying affects the environment.”
That awareness is growing fast, though, as climate concerns have sparked a public backlash against flying that would have been almost unthinkable even a year ago. One of its most prominent advocates is Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish activist, who sailed to New York to attend a climate summit in September because she has forsworn air travel.
For airlines, the sudden takeoff of the movement presents a potentially dangerous challenge. Airline passenger growth shows signs of weakening in countries where flygskam is
catching on. There has been a 3% drop in 2019 in the number of passengers for domestic flights going through 10 of Sweden’s state-owned airports, compared to 2018.
“This is an existential question for us,” says Rickard Gustafson, CEO of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), based near Stockholm. “If we don’t clearly articulate a path to a sustainable industry, it will be a problem.”
The issue of passenger attitudes to emissions was not considered a priority when he brought it up at the board of the International Air Transport Association, on which he sits. But that has now changed. “Six months later this was a hot topic,” says Gustafson.
“Aviation needs to reinvent itself,” concedes Johan Lundgren, CEO of easyJet.
The problem for the aviation industry is few technological solutions are available to help it reduce emissions and tackle the potential consumer backlash.
“The basic trouble is that humankind has not worked out how to put a passenger jet on a long-distance flight yet without burning through ... 100 tons of fossil fuels,” says Mike BernersLee, a professor at Lancaster University. “We have to bite the bullet on aviation, because we just don’t know how to do it in a low-carbon way.”
Airlines account for about 2% of CO² emissions globally. But when jets fly through the sky they also emit other substances that have a significant warming effect — such as nitrogen oxide, and contrails, the long thin clouds of frozen vapour that are visible from the ground.
A growing body of research shows the climate impact of aeroplanes is about twice as much as their CO² emissions alone would suggest — closer to 5% of human-caused warming.
Volker Grewe, professor of atmospheric physics at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), says “non-CO² effects” are a major contributor to aircraft’s warming effect.
“Aircraft are flying at higher altitude of 10km-12km and whatever emissions they produce at that altitude remains longer in the atmosphere. Surface transportation ... doesn’t have these additional effects.”
The threat of a consumer backlash over emissions is not a complete surprise for the industry. Some executives have been trying to focus attention on emissions for at least a decade. Iata made a commitment in 2009 that the entire industry would halve emissions by 2050, relative to 2005 levels.
“It’s very ambitious,” Iata spokesperson Chris Goater says. “We have a big responsibility and it is a huge challenge to deal with this.”
Some airlines, especially in European countries with particularly environmentally engaged customers, have made their own specific pledges. SAS has said it will cut emissions by 25% by 2030 and is aiming to run domestic flights on biofuel.
IAG, which owns British Airways and Spain’s Iberia, has pledged to invest $400m on developing alternative fuels over a 20-year period, while United Airlines has said it will spend up to $2bn annually on fuel-efficient aircraft and has teamed up with biofuel makers.
Dutch carrier KLM even launched a campaign urging passengers to fly less. It includes tips such as “consider making video calls instead of meeting face to face” and “explore other travel options” such as a train.
With the rise of flight shame, airlines are racing to find an answer to how to decarbonise. Underscoring the difficulty of the problem, different airlines are taking quite separate approaches. Willie Walsh, chairman of IAG, acknowledges there are no simple, short-term solutions, “therefore aviation needs to use some of its money to provide incentive to others and we’ll only do that where, you know, these are real carbon reductions,” he says.
One of the most promising areas is alternative low-carbon fuels, which could be used in existing aircraft, but with a lower carbon footprint. These include biofuels, which can be made from plants, waste or algae, and synthetic fuel, which resembles jet fuel that can be manufactured using renewable energy. Others are pinning their hopes on electric aircraft and hybrid battery-fuel designs.
At present, the only one of these technologies being used commercially is biofuels, albeit at a very small scale. United Airlines, for example, has partnered with California-based AltAir Fuels, which supplies the airline with biofuel made from agricultural waste. It has also teamed up with Fulcrum BioEnergy, which is developing waste-to-fuel refineries.
“We see this as the future in this space,” says Aaron Robinson, senior sustainability manager at United Airlines. He is optimistic about using waste for biofuels given that it is cheaper to acquire than crops.
However, the disadvantage of biofuels is they are still much more expensive than regular fuels, and would face serious land constraints to being scaled up. Biofuels can be made on a small scale using agricultural and household waste, but to reach the level of production that would have a big effect on aviation emissions, much more land would be needed to grow the crops to be converted.
As a result, many environmentalists are dismissive of biofuel as a longterm solution, particularly because a growing world population will need more food to feed itself. To limit global warming to a 1.5°C increase in temperatures would require so much biofuel that it would take up to 7-million km² of arable land — roughly the size of Australia — to produce that much feedstock, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“If you were to replace all today’s aviation fuel with biofuel, with first-generation biofuel, it would be at the expense of 2,100 calories per person per day for everyone on the planet,” Berners-Lee said. “It would take almost all of humankind’s calorific requirements ... So that is absolutely not a solution.”
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IF YOU REPLACE ALL AVIATION FUEL WITH BIOFUEL, IT WOULD BE AT THE EXPENSE OF 2,100 CALORIES PER PERSON PER DAY FOR EVERYONE ON EARTH